Connecting Dispersed Communities on the Move

Abstract

Travel assists the development and maintenance of social networks from the local to the global by connecting people to places. The time spent travelling has tended to be regarded by many analysts as a necessary sacrifice to achieve this connectivity. Accordingly, the expansion or dispersal of communities has been a function of journey times, limited in turn by journey speeds in the face of increasingly congested transport networks. Yet in a world being transformed by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), this article contends that there is now a need to examine more closely the presumption that travel time is “wasted” and indeed to consider how, with the aid of ICT, this time might be being used to sustain or even encourage the dispersal of communities.